How to Read Old Labels and Names in Chinese Transgender History: A Four-Column Guide to Self-Identification, Media, Medicine, and Archives

Abstract

Public sources for transgender history in China often place several names and labels around the same person. Newspapers made terms such as bianxing ren highly visible through stories centered on surgery. Hospitals organized clinics through diagnostic language such as yixingzheng. Health-administration documents used bianxing shoushu (“sex-reassignment surgery”) in 2009 and xingbie chongzhi jishu (“gender reassignment technology”) in 2022. Community surveys and service organizations increasingly used kuaxingbie (“transgender”), kuar, MTF, FTM, and related forms. A person’s public name, self-description, work, relationships, and life narrative form another documentary line.

This guide asks a practical historical question: who used a given name or label, for which institutional purpose, at which point in time, and in what relationship to the person’s own public self-description? It proposes a four-column attribution method for historical reading, editorial work, archival description, and agent-assisted retrieval: (1) self-identification and public name; (2) labels supplied by media, relatives, or community records; (3) medical, administrative, and legal terminology; and (4) present-day editorial description and discovery terms. Three temporal fields—event_time, record_time, and revision_time—separate the event itself, the creation of the surviving record, and later metadata or editorial change.

A second tool, the name-event chain, records public name use, media recording, institutional registration, archival indexing, and later revision as distinct events. The 1990 reporting on Qin Huiying and a 2007 retrospective, Jin Xing’s 1995 surgery and 2011 interviews, the 2009 and 2022 national medical rules, and surveys and advocacy reports from 2016–2019 show how one life can enter several documentary systems at once. Work in transgender history, archival studies, queer cataloging, media studies, and journalism further shows that classification, names, and pronouns participate in historical production. The four-column method makes that production visible while keeping historical wording searchable and present-day narration person-centered.

Keywords: transgender history; China; historical sources; names; terminology; media; medicine; archives; metadata

1. The historical question: whose language is a name or label?

Transgender history has an unusually visible source problem: one person may appear under several terms produced by different institutions. Chinese news reporting in the 1990s often made surgery the central event in a profile, giving bianxing ren and phrases such as “transsexual dancer” strong media visibility. Hospitals required terms that could enter diagnostic systems, clinics, and medical records. Health authorities required technical names connected to institutional eligibility, ethics, and quality control. Community organizations and surveys required categories through which participants could describe identity, experience, and service needs (Ministry of Health 2009; UNDP 2016; National Health Commission 2022).

Modern Chinese histories of sex and gender give this documentary pattern a deeper genealogy. Howard Chiang’s studies of sexology, castration, sex change, and the periodical press trace how concepts of bodies and sexual difference moved among medicine, science, vernacular culture, and journalism. Transgender China extends that inquiry across history, film, opera, performance, and regional Chinese cultures (Chiang 2012, 2018a, 2018b). Xiaogao Zhou and Songyin Liu’s content analysis of 154 state-newspaper articles from 1980 to 2021 shows how medical explanation, socialization, and “gender crisis” frames made gender diversity legible as a governance concern (Zhou & Liu 2023). A label in a newspaper therefore records a person and also records how editors, medical knowledge, and institutions understood that person at a particular moment.

The first rule of this guide is simple: identify the speaker before interpreting the label. “Bianxing ren” in a headline belongs first to a journalistic classification. A diagnostic term in a health regulation belongs first to a medical-administrative system. A name or identity description spoken by the person belongs first to that public self-description. “Transgender” in present-day editorial prose can function as an access term that connects earlier materials to current readers. Each form carries historical value once its source role is explicit.

This approach also helps editors avoid turning a heterogeneous archive into a single modern vocabulary. Older records retain evidence about the period that produced them. Present-day editorial narration can use a reliable public name and contemporary explanatory language. The relationship between those layers becomes part of the historical argument.

2. Method: four columns and three clocks

The source base combines mainland Chinese newspapers, medical and administrative rules, international-institution and community surveys, interviews, digital-archive policies, and scholarship in transgender history, archival studies, classification, and media representation. Chinese sources supply concrete historical scenes. The Digital Transgender Archive, Homosaurus, journalism style guides, and reparative-description programs supply comparative methods for handling names and legacy terminology (DTA 2026a, 2026b; Homosaurus 2026; TJA 2026; Yale Library 2020).

Every important person/term record can be stored in four columns:

Three clocks sit beside the columns. event_time records the surgery, interview, registration, court event, or other historical occurrence. record_time records when the surviving newspaper, policy, webpage, or archive item was produced. revision_time records a later metadata update, renamed webpage, redirected tag, or editorial correction. These clocks distinguish the history of the person from the history of the record and from the later history of archival stewardship.

Names benefit especially from this structure. A single person may have a publicly used name, a name held in an institutional record at a particular date, a name printed by a newspaper, and an alias retained for archival discovery. Each has a distinct source role. Research notes preserve those relationships. Public narration gives priority to the reliably known public name.

The Digital Transgender Archive offers a close methodological parallel. Its policies describe metadata creation as interpretive and political work, favor language and names used by people represented in the materials, and retain contemporaneous terminology where it carries historical and discovery value (DTA 2026a). This practice demonstrates an important archival principle: the original-record layer and the current-description layer can coexist through clear attribution.

3. Qin Huiying: the 1990 headline and the 2007 retrospective belong to separate moments

Public sources on Qin Huiying show how time and speaker position alter labels. A 2007 Southern Weekly retrospective preserved a key earlier newspaper event: on 31 August 1990, Wenhui Daily ran the second-page headline “教授施妙术，须眉变女郎” (“Professor performs skillful operation; a bearded man becomes a woman”). The 2007 article described Qin as “the first transgender person publicly reported by Chinese media” within its retrospective framing (Southern Weekly 2007). The two records stand seventeen years apart.

The four-column card separates their functions. The first column records Qin Huiying’s public name and statements in the retrospective. The second records the 1990 headline and the 2007 journalist’s category. The third records the medical procedure and medical explanations available through the reporting. The fourth supplies a current editorial note explaining that the item is an important source for the history of early public reporting on transgender people in mainland China and that its headline preserves 1990 journalistic rhetoric.

This separation preserves two histories at once. Qin’s public life and name form one line of continuity. Newspaper wording forms a media history of its own. Zhou and Liu show that state newspapers from the 1980s onward repeatedly organized gender diversity through medicine, family, education, and governance frames (Zhou & Liu 2023). Ke Zhang and colleagues find that health, victimhood, and progress frames coexist in Chinese English-language reporting on sexual minorities, while visual representation creates an additional layer of social classification (Zhang et al. 2023; Zhang & Zhuang 2025). Qin’s coverage therefore works as a source about a person and a source about media institutions.

Claims such as “first” also benefit from a dedicated scope field. Such a claim describes the boundary of a particular archive, media system, or retrospective search. Discovery can expand through local newspapers, hospital archives, and private collections. A record can store claim_scope = publicly reported in mass media, claim_source = 2007 retrospective, and claim_time = 2007. The superlative becomes a sourced historical proposition with a defined scope and date.

4. Jin Xing: media repeated “transition history” while she also spoke about work, family, and legal recognition

Jin Xing’s public record shows another pattern. Her 1995 surgery became the historical anchor for the documentary Miss Jin Xing and for extensive later reporting. Around 2011, the documentary’s renewed circulation, television-judge controversy, and multiple interviews led news outlets to foreground words related to “sex change” and “transsexual dancer” in headlines and summaries (China News Service 2011a, 2011b, 2011c). Interviews from the same period preserved Jin’s own public statements about work, family, her life history, and legal recognition. A CNTV-carried interview connected her recognized legal status directly to her qualification to work on television (CNTV 2011).

The four columns increase the resolution of this source set. The person column records “Jin Xing” as the continuously used public name and stores direct self-description from a specific interview. The media column records which headlines foregrounded transition history. The institutional column stores her statements about legal recognition and the reported administrative rationale surrounding television participation. The editorial column connects current discovery terms such as dancer, television personality, public transgender figure, media history, and Chinese transgender history.

Media selection is itself a historical force here. A public figure may have decades of dance, teaching, television, family, and civic expression, while headlines repeatedly select one 1995 medical event as the dominant descriptor. Bracco, Sczesny, and Gustafsson Sendén’s comparative study of European headlines demonstrates how patterns of transgender representation vary systematically with social and legal settings (Bracco et al. 2024). Chinese corpus and visual studies likewise show concentration around a limited set of frames, including health, victimhood, controversy, and social progress (Zhang et al. 2023; Zhang & Zhuang 2025).

A historical database can therefore tag the speaker every time a media label appears: 2011-09 / China News Service carrying News Morning Post / headline foregrounds transition history. A direct statement from Jin receives its own event record. The two can be read together, allowing readers to see both media priorities and the breadth of the person’s public life.

5. Medical terms and personal identity: from the 2009 surgery rule to the 2022 technology rule

Medical and administrative texts have unusually clear institutional functions. The Ministry of Health’s 2009 Technical Management Standards for Sex-Reassignment Surgery (Trial) placed bianxing shoushu inside rules for institutional eligibility, practitioner qualifications, ethics, and patient criteria. The document also preserved diagnostic and eligibility language of its period (Ministry of Health 2009). The 2022 national standards used xingbie chongzhi jishu (“gender reassignment technology”) and placed it under code G05 in the restricted-medical-technology system (National Health Commission 2022).

These documents make the distinction between an institutional term and a person’s self-description concrete. An institutional term answers questions about how a hospital performs a regulated technology, how clinicians qualify, how cases enter a workflow, and how quality is managed. A self-description answers how a person describes gender and life. The four-column card stores each form in its proper role, allowing editors to quote policy wording accurately while using the person’s public self-description in narrative prose.

The World Health Organization’s ICD-11 changes add another layer of classification history. WHO places gender incongruence in the chapter on conditions related to sexual health and describes the revision as reflecting contemporary knowledge about transgender health (WHO 2026). Chinese advocacy research from 2019 records experiences of diagnostic requirements, surgery eligibility, family consent, information access, and medical care (Amnesty International 2019a, 2019b). One historical subject can therefore appear across diagnostic, technical, policy, survey, and first-person sources.

The most useful metadata field here is institutional_function. “Gender reassignment technology” functions as a regulated medical-technology category. “Transgender” in a 2016 national survey functions as a research-population and public-policy category. A person’s name and gender description in an interview function as public self-representation. Institutional function explains historical location more precisely than a simple old/new terminology scale.

6. Surveys and community materials: category design is historical evidence

The 2016 national survey jointly implemented by UNDP, Peking University’s Department of Sociology, and the Beijing LGBT Center received nearly 30,000 valid questionnaires. It covered law, education, employment, family, health care, media, and social services, and organized the project around sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression (UNDP 2016). The 2017 national transgender survey used 2,060 valid questionnaires and reported categories including transgender women, transgender men, genderqueer people, and cross-dressers alongside medical and social needs (Beijing LGBT Center 2017; China Development Brief 2017). UNDP’s 2018 legal-gender-recognition review connected identity documents, education, employment, health, and community advocacy within a policy framework (UNDP 2018a, 2018b).

These reports make category design itself an object of historical study. A researcher can record which options a survey provided, how many forms of self-description it invited, how English terms were translated, and how identity categories were connected to medical needs or legal procedures. Aguirre-Sánchez-Beato’s conceptual review of trans terminology shows that research definitions can foreground identity, expression, the body, diagnosis, and political claims in different combinations (Aguirre-Sánchez-Beato 2018). Thieme and Saunders’ study of citation in trans studies treats names, pronouns, and scholarly reference as relations of care within an academic community (Thieme & Saunders 2018).

Chinese community language continues to develop across service organizations, creators, and platforms. Terms such as kuar, FTM, MTF, FTX, and MtX can serve as contemporary discovery aliases when public evidence supports their use. Earlier sources retain forms such as bianxing ren and yixingzheng in their source fields. A dual-layer index can therefore connect generations of search terms while preserving terminology change as evidence.

7. The name-event chain: separate public use, institutional registration, media recording, and archival revision

Names create the most concrete attribution task in historical research. The Trans Journalists Association’s current stylebook recommends using a person’s current name and pronouns when writing about their past and treats publication of a former name as sensitive information that requires explicit permission. NLGJA distinguishes birth name, deadname, and legal name, making clear that a legal record and a person’s actual public name are different concepts (TJA 2026; NLGJA 2026). GLAAD’s guidance on reporting transgender crime victims also asks reporters to identify the source of a name when police, relatives, or another institution supplied it (GLAAD 2012). These rules address contemporary journalism; historical archives add the separate requirement of preserving source provenance.

This guide therefore models names as an event chain:

public_name_use → media_record → institutional_record → archive_index → later_revision

Each node receives a date, source, and role. A person’s first public use of a name is one event. A newspaper printing that name is another. An identity-document or institutional update is another. An archive connecting older records to a newer public name creates another event. A later update to a webpage title, taxonomy tag, redirect, or alternative text creates another.

The chain makes archival mismatch explainable. A reader can see why one database still contains an older form while current narration uses the reliably known public name. The Digital Transgender Archive demonstrates this layered approach by favoring self-used language and names while retaining contemporaneous terminology for historical context and discovery (DTA 2026a). The Trans Journalists Association similarly treats visible story text and backend web assets as separate editorial layers, recommending current names in active taxonomies and redirect-based discovery where appropriate (TJA 2026).

The same structure supports pseudonyms, anonymization, and protective names. Human-rights reports often protect interviewees with pseudonyms. Court materials may use a surname plus honorific, initials, or anonymized characters. Community writing may use a stable screen name. A record can store public_name, source_pseudonym, legal_record_name_status, and archive_alias separately. A name becomes a sourced, permission-aware relationship with explicit provenance.

8. Archival description: preserve source wording, add context, create a current access layer

Archival description determines whether researchers find an item and also determines the first classification they encounter. Rawson’s work on transgender archival access shows how archival environments and language shape encounters with transgender materials. Rawson’s study of images of gender transgression further treats selection, organization, and labeling as epistemological acts as well as administrative ones (Rawson 2010, 2017). Drabinski’s queer reading of catalogs likewise presents classification systems as historically situated texts that users can interpret critically (Drabinski 2013).

The Digital Transgender Archive was built around a related discovery problem. Transgender historical materials are dispersed among universities, community organizations, personal collections, periodicals, photographs, zines, and born-digital files. Older finding aids often use period-specific terminology. DTA connects these holdings through a common discovery interface and metadata layer (Library of Congress 2026; DTA 2026b). Homosaurus supplies an LGBTQ+ linked-data vocabulary that libraries and archives can add alongside broad subject vocabularies to improve discovery (Homosaurus 2026).

Yale’s reparative archival description program supplies another operational pattern. When creator-supplied or legacy wording carries research value, the institution can preserve its provenance and add explanatory context and current community-informed terminology. The work is iterative, and descriptive notes make revision visible (Yale Library 2020). The Archives for Black Lives in Philadelphia anti-racist description resources similarly separate creator-sourced description, legacy description, transparency, subjects, and community collaboration (SAA 2022). These practices transfer well to transgender history: an original headline belongs in a transcription or source-title field; current subject terms belong in an access layer; an editorial note explains the relationship.

A Chinese historical collection benefits strongly from this two-entry design. One researcher may search the newspaper-era term bianxing ren. Another may search the present-day term kuaxingbie. Both access terms can resolve to the same item. Terminological change then becomes discoverable historical information.

9. Counterevidence and complex cases: where the four columns matter most

A first complex case occurs when a person’s public self-description changes over time. Earlier interviews, later interviews, and distinct social contexts may carry several formulations. The card assigns a date and source to each public statement so that change becomes part of the historical record. Thieme and Saunders center author preferences in citation practice, while TJA centers the person’s current requested usage (Thieme & Saunders 2018; TJA 2026).

A second case occurs when a historical subject left only a small amount of direct testimony. Early twentieth-century newspapers, medical archives, and police files were often institutionally produced, with a person’s voice surviving as a quoted fragment, a letter, or an indirect report. Gill-Peterson’s history of transgender children demonstrates the tension between medical archives and letters written by young people. Chiang’s work on Chinese sexology similarly places doctors, journalists, scientists, and gender-minority subjects inside the same knowledge network (Gill-Peterson 2018; Chiang 2018a). The self-identification column can therefore carry an evidence-density field, while media and institutional columns remain available for the surviving records.

A third case occurs when historical terminology carries high retrieval value and also reflects a sharply different medical or social vocabulary. DTA, Yale, and Homosaurus all distinguish the source layer from a present-day access layer (DTA 2026a; Yale Library 2020; Homosaurus 2026). Editors can preserve wording in titles, filenames, and quoted source fields while explicitly labeling its date, institution, and function in narrative prose.

A fourth case occurs when one person has a legal name, public name, stage name, screen name, and protective pseudonym. Weathington and Brubaker’s study of queer identities in Wikidata shows the structural tension between normative databases and complex queer identity data (Weathington & Brubaker 2023). Databases favor stable fields; human lives often require multivalue, temporal, and contextual representation. A name-event chain adds time and provenance to each form.

10. Original synthesis: turn labels from static attributes into recorded events

The central synthesis of the four-column method models every label as an event with an actor, function, and date. Historical databases often model name, gender, and identity as stable fields. The sources examined here show that each field can be produced at a different moment by a different institution. An editor writes a headline. A clinician records a diagnosis. A public-security, school, or other administrative system updates a field. A community organization designs survey categories. A person states a public name in an interview. An archivist later revises metadata. Each action has an actor, function, and date.

A reproducible historical record can therefore use:

label_event = {term, speaker, target, function, event_time, record_time, source, confidence}

A name record adds:

name_event = {name_form, role, used_by, valid_from, record_time, source, publication_permission, archive_visibility}

Together, the structures connect personal history with the history of records. A reader can aggregate by person or by newspaper, hospital, policy office, community organization, or archive. Researchers can also compare the four columns at the same historical moment. A media term may remain prominent while a clinic uses diagnostic terminology, a community survey uses “transgender,” and a health authority adopts a technical phrase such as “gender reassignment technology.” This micro-level model extends the vocabulary-stratigraphy framework developed in GenderLibs’ earlier study of Chinese transgender terminology (GenderLibs 2026).

The same structure gives search systems and AI agents clear duties. Retrieval can use historical terminology to find old sources and route results to current topic pages. Summaries carry the speaker and date together with a label. Entity resolution consults the name-event chain and uses string similarity as supporting evidence. Discovery coverage and person-centered presentation can therefore share one data model.

11. A practical source-reading table

The table aims at traceability. Every label points back to a speaker. Every name points back to a use context. Every present-day explanation points back to an editorial action. Caswell and Cifor’s concept of radical empathy treats archives as networks of responsibility among record creators, people represented in records, archivists, and users; their later work presents care as continuing maintenance (Caswell & Cifor 2016, 2021). The four-column card turns that relational principle into a compact data structure.

Conclusion

Old names and labels in Chinese transgender history record several histories at once: personal life, media narrative, medical knowledge, administrative procedure, and archival technology. Qin Huiying’s 1990 reporting and the 2007 retrospective show one person being described across different journalistic moments. Jin Xing’s 1995 surgery and 2011 media cycle show public self-description, professional life, family narrative, and repeated media focus on transition history moving along separate documentary lines. The 2009 and 2022 health rules show institutional language changing inside a regulated medical system (Southern Weekly 2007; China News Service 2011a; Ministry of Health 2009; National Health Commission 2022).

The four-column attribution method gives those differences a stable container. Self-identification and public name, media/community labels, medical-administrative-legal terms, and present-day editorial description each retain provenance. Three clocks record event, record creation, and later revision. The name-event chain connects public use, media recording, institutional registration, archival indexing, and subsequent metadata change. Historical wording keeps its evidentiary and discovery value, while current readers receive an explicit and person-centered access layer.

The resulting historical question is more precise than choosing a single label for a person: who used this name or term, at what time, from which position of authority, and for which institutional function? What public self-description did the person leave? How did later archives and editors connect the records? Once those questions become fields in the source card, names and labels become a verifiable, searchable, and revisable chain of historical events.

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